Margaret Kirkby, a medieval anchoress

Blog series Medieval manuscripts

Sometime in the 1300s, a young nun from Yorkshire asked the local hermit for spiritual advice. Her name was Margaret Kirkby, from the parish of Kirkby Ravensworth, in the North Riding. He was Richard Rolle (died 1349), who is renowned as one of the most influential religious authors from medieval England.

In response to Margaret’s request, Richard Rolle composed a guide for recluses, in Middle English, known as The Form of Living. By this stage, Margaret had left the nunnery of Hampole (where Rolle was the spiritual director) and had become an anchoress at East Layton, near her place of birth, in the vicinity of modern-day Darlington and Barnard Castle. The British Library has recently acquired an important manuscript containing The Form of Living and other works composed by Richard Rolle, in a compilation entitled ‘On the contemplative life’ (Add MS 89790). The manuscript in question had formerly been in the collection of Longleat House (Longleat MS 29), and it is one of five volumes purchased by the Library with the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The American Trust for the British Library, the British Library Collections Trust, the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries, and other donors.

Most significantly, this is the only manuscript in which Rolle’s works are dedicated explicitly to Margaret Kirkby, thus providing key evidence of their close professional relationship. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography even goes so far as to describe this as ‘a platonic Yorkshire love story that anticipates Wuthering Heights’ (Hughes, 2004).

On the page shown here, the red heading to the text (the rubric) reads, ‘Tractatus Ricardi heremite ad Margaretam de Kyrkby reclusam de vita contemplatiua’. At the time of writing (December 2025), visitors to the Library’s Treasures Gallery can also view the page in question, where it is on display in the cases devoted to medieval and modern literature, sitting snugly between Beowulf and Shakespeare’s First Folio. The entire manuscript can also be viewed online.

The inclusion of Margaret Kirkby’s name is not the only interesting feature of this volume. Most unusually for a Middle English literary manuscript, it is written in the Hiberno-English dialect used in medieval Ireland. Based on the handwriting, we can deduce that the manuscript was written by a scribe named Nicholas Bellewe, probably in the 1420s or 1430s. Bellewe is known to have been active in Dublin between 1428 and 1475, and from 1433 to 1445 he worked for the Fitzwilliam family. In all likelihood, this volume was made for a female patron who lived in the vicinity of Dublin.

In addition to the works of Richard Rolle, Add MS 89790 contains other devotional texts that would have appealed to female readers, including what is the oldest and most complete copy of A Revelation of Purgatory, describing a series of visions experienced by an anchoress in Winchester in 1422. Other texts in this manuscript are Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Parson’s Tale (part of his Canterbury Tales) and works by the spiritual authors Walter Hilton and William Fleet.

In the 1380s, Margaret Kirkby returned to the nunnery at Hampole. Guided by the teachings of Richard Rolle, she had devoted herself to spiritual contemplation. In her earlier life, she had suffered seizures, and Rolle had allowed her to sleep on his shoulder at the window of her anchorage. She died in the 1390s, and was buried in the cemetery at Hampole, near the body of Richard Rolle himself.

Reference

Hughes, J. (2004) 'Kirby, Margaret', Oxford Book of National Bibliography. Available at https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/57764 [subscription login required].